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Guinea's Political Prisoners: Colonial Models, Postcolonial Innovation

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 September 2012

Mairi S. MacDonald
Mairi S. MacDonald*
Affiliation:
University of Toronto
*
mairi.macdonald@utoronto.ca
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Abstract

Much postcolonial theory assumes a continuity of both behavior and representation between colonial rule and what has succeeded it across sub-Saharan Africa. The maltreatment of political prisoners in Guinea in the wake of its brief invasion by Portuguese troops in November 1970 provides a challenging but ultimately fruitful empirical record against which to test this theory. I use an analytical approach informed by history, law, anthropology, and communications theory to explore continuities between the legal practices of French colonial and contemporary revolutionary regimes, on one hand, and Guinea's pursuit of supposed traitors, on the other. Though there is more discontinuity than direct inheritance in the administration of justice, the article argues that the representation of Guinea's colonial heritage was a central part of how President Sékou Touré legitimized his state and his own rule. I suggest that the colonial legacy operated more as a benchmark of what behavior might be acceptable in a postcolonial revolutionary state such as Guinea than as a linear precedent from French colonial rule to the Guinean revolution. The regime's representation of its colonial legacy also helps to explain the form, medium, and content of the political prisoners' broadcast confessions.

Type
Research Article
Information
Comparative Studies in Society and History , Volume 54 , Issue 4 , October 2012 , pp. 890 - 913
Copyright
Copyright © Society for the Comparative Study of Society and History 2012

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References

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7 The PDG published two compilations of material relating directly or indirectly to the 1971 purge: Livre blanc sur l'agression portugaise contre la République de Guinée (Conakry: Imprimerie nationale Patrice Lumumba, 1971)Google Scholar; and La Cinquième colonne (Conakry: Imprimerie nationale Patrice Lumumba, 1971)Google Scholar. The U.S. Foreign Broadcast Information Service monitored Guinean radio broadcasts throughout the period; its daily summary for the Middle East and Sub-Saharan Africa records the broadcast confessions of a number of the PDG's supposed opponents. Diplomatic records, the primary source of eyewitness accounts consulted for this article, are fairly scarce. French and British colonial and diplomatic archives are useful sources for the period before 1965. By 1970, however, Guinea had severed relations with most Western states, including France and the United Kingdom. Accordingly, I draw here principally on the records of the U.S. State Department and the political archives of the German Auswärtiges Amt. I also consulted reports sent by East German diplomats in Conakry, which are also available through the latter archives.

8 Ahmed Sékou Touré, “Premier appel à la nation,” in Livre blanc, 9.

9 Conakry (Sherer) to State, no. 1855, 22 Nov. 1970 (marked 11 Nov.), file POL Guin-Port, Central Subject-Numeric Files 1970–1973 (hereafter SN 1970–1973), Records of the Department of State, Record Group 59 (hereafter RG 59), National Archives at College Park, Md. (hereafter NACP). The Peace Corps, expelled in November 1966, had resumed operations in Guinea by June 1969: McIlvaine (Conakry), “Bi-weekly #12,” A-62, 23 June 1969, file POL 2 Guin 1/1/69, Central Subject-Numeric Files 1967–1969, RG 59, NACP.

10 Touré first enunciated his thesis that Guinea was “perpetually threatened by external intrigues” in May 1960. Siraud (Conakry), “Situation intérieure,” no. 532/AL, 28 May 1960, Guinée 43, Direction Afrique-Levant (hereafter DAL), Archives du Ministère des affaires étrangères, Paris (hereafter AMAE). By 1970, even the U.S. embassy was forced to acknowledge its role in Guinean politics: Sherer (Conakry), “Guinea: Le Complot est Permanent,” no. A-117, 28 Sept. 1970, POL 15-1 Guin, SN 1970–1973, RG 59, NACP.

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15 Alpha-Abdoulaye Diallo, La Vérité du Ministre, 33–36.

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18 Foreign Broadcast Information Service, Daily Report, Middle East and Sub-Saharan Africa, V. 26 Aug. 1971, W2–W3.

19 Conakry (Norland) to State, no. 1481, 30 July 1971; and no. 1488, 2 Aug. 1971, POL 29 Guin, SN 1970–1973, RG 59, NACP.

20 Conakry (Norland) to State, no. 649, 18 May 1972, POL 29 Guin, SN 1970–1973, RG 59, NACP.

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22 Diallo, La Vérité du ministre, 48–114; Alata, Prison d'Afrique, 30–45, 106–10; Tchidimbo, Noviciat d'un évêque, 163–74; and Conakry (Norland) to State, no. 649, 18 May 1972, POL 29 Guin, SN 1970–1973, RG 59, NACP. Marx and other survivors described their maltreatment in graphic detail in the documentary film La Danse avec l'aveugle, directed by Alain d'Aix and Morgane Laliberté (Montreal: InformAction Films Inc., 1978)Google Scholar.

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27 Some of the literature concerning the Great Terror distinguishes between the Moscow show trials as arbitrary processes evidently designed primarily to make an example of prominent individuals, and other components of the purges that peaked in 1937–1938, which more often employed regular judicial practices. See, for instance, Thurston, Robert W., Life and Terror in Stalin's Russia, 1934–1941 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996)Google Scholar.

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33 NATO (Robert Fred Ellsworth) to State, “Discussion of Situation in Guinea,” no. 18, 5 Jan. 1971, POL Guin-Port, SN 1970–1973, RG 59, NACP.

34 Mairi S. MacDonald, “The Challenge of Guinean Independence, 1958–1971,” PhD thesis, University of Toronto, 2009, http://hdl.handle.net/1807/19287.

35 Haut Commissaire Dakar (Messmer) to Ministre de la France d'outre-mer (MinFOM), 2881/CAB/DIR/J, 27 Oct. 1958, in Guinée 9; Conakry (Siraud) to MAE/AL, no. 785, 5 Nov. 1959; MAE (Sebillaud) to Conakry, no. 973, 6 Nov. 1959, Guinée 14; DAL, AMAE.

36 Haut Commissaire Dakar (Messmer) to MinFOM, 2881/CAB/DIR/J, 27 Oct. 1958, Guinée 9; Note, “La Guinée,” 5 Sept. 1959, Guinée 15, DAL, AMAE. Both Touré and his French critics used “reversion” to signal a return to non-colonial ways.

37 See, for example, Conklin, Alice L., A Mission to Civilize: The Republican Idea of Empire in France and West Africa, 1895–1930 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997)Google Scholar.

38 The French Overseas Ministry dealt with correspondence from the LDH concerning colonial operations in AOF at least as early as 1914. See, for example, Affpol1/512/40, Archives nationales d'outre-mer, Aix-en-Provence (ANOM). The LDH archives held by the Bibliothèque de Documentation internationale contemporaine also provide myriad examples of such complaints.

39 Vimont, Jean-Claude, La Prison Politique en France: Genèse d'un mode d'incarcération spécifique XVIIIe–XXe siècles (Paris: Anthropos-historiques, 1993)Google Scholar; Diallo, Mamadou Dian Chérif, Répression et enfermement en Guinée: Le pénitencier de Fotoba et la prison centrale de Conakry de 1900 à 1958 (Paris: L'Harmattan, 2005), 553Google Scholar. Senegal's refusal to extradite members of the Front de liberation nationale de Guinée (FLNG) at Touré's request is prominent among the charges the latter leveled against Senegal's president Léopold Sédar Senghor in La Cinquième colonne. On the origins of the rule against extradition for political offences, see Edward M. Wise's review of Christine Van den Wijngaert The Political Offence Exception to Extradition: The Delicate Problem of Balancing the Rights of the Individual and the International Public Order, in American Journal of Comparative Law 30 (1982): 362–71CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

40 Benton, Lauren, Law and Colonial Cultures: Legal Regimes in World History, 1400–1900 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 9–10Google Scholar.

41 Mamadou Diallo, Répression et enfermement, 83–84. See also Mann, Gregory, “What Was the Indigénat? The ‘Empire of Law’ in French West Africa,” Journal of African History 50 (2009): 331–53CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

42 Mamadou Diallo, Répression et enfermement, 55; Bernault, Florence, “The Politics of Enclosure in Colonial and Post-Colonial Africa,” in Bernault, F., ed., A History of Prison and Confinement in Africa, Roitman, Janet, trans. (Portsmouth, N.H.: Heinemann, 2003), 2Google Scholar. Thierno Bah adds nuance to this statement by pointing to reports of forms of incarceration and banishment in the Songhay Empire of the sixteenth century C.E. and the kingdom of Dahomey in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, in “Captivity and Incarceration in Nineteenth-Century West Africa,” in Florence Bernault, ed., A History of Prison, 69–76.

43 Mamadou Diallo, Répression et enfermement, 9.

44 The divergence between the rule of law and investigative and penal practice characteristic of colonial “emergencies” is considered in Geertsema, Johan, “Exceptions, Bare Life and Colonialism,” in Ramraj, Victor V., ed., Emergencies and the Limits of Legality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 337–59CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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46 Several recent works discuss the Touré regime's repression of pre-colonial traditions, particularly where they had the potential to reinforce alternative authorities or bonds of allegiance other than to itself. See, for instance, Hojberg, Christian Kordt, Resisting State Iconoclasm among the Loma of Guinea (Durham, N.C.: Carolina Academic Press, 2007)Google Scholar; Michael McGovern, “Unmasking the State: Developing Modern Political Subjectivities in 20th Century Guinea,” PhD diss., Emory University, 2004; and Straker, Jay, Youth, Nationalism, and the Guinean Revolution (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009)Google Scholar.

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48 Conakry to State, no. 251, 17 Nov. 1965; POL 23-9 Guinea, SN 1964–66, RG 59, NACP.

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57 Dignity—as horonya—had profound resonance in Mande culture, a significance that has survived both colonial and postcolonial rule. I am indebted to Jan Jansen for this observation. For the importance of dignity or honor among the Fulbe and generally in African cultures, see Iliffe, John, Honour in African History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), esp. 31–53Google Scholar. For a contrasting view of the Mande, see Klein, Martin A., “The Concept of Honour and the Persistence of Servility in the Western Soudan,” Cahiers d'études africaines 3–4, 179 (2005): 831–52CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Jansen, Jan, The Griot's Craft: An Essay on Oral Tradition and Diplomacy (Münster: Lit; Piscataway, N.J.: Transaction Publishers, 2000), 35–52Google Scholar, provides an interesting counterpoint, exploring how griots use the performance of shamelessness as a tool of diplomacy.

58 Agence France-Presse, “Sixième adresse hebdomadaire de Sékou Touré,” 24 Dec. 1958, Guinée 12, DAL, AMAE.

59 Sékou Touré, “Adresse au Cinéma Vox, Conakry,” 26 Oct. 1958, Guinée 12, DAL, AMAE.

60 Straker, Youth, Nationalism, and the Guinean Revolution, 175.

61 As Martin Shipway has observed, “Colonialism … [is] an integral part of twentieth-century European cultural and political modernism,” in Decolonization and Its Impact: A Comparative Approach to the End of the Colonial Empires (Oxford: Blackwell, 2008), 10Google Scholar.

62 Pierre R. Graham, “U.S. Policy Assessment,” no. A-130, 26 Jan. 1966, POL 2–3 Guin, SN 1964–66, RG 59, NACP.

63 UN General Assembly resolution 2200 A (XXI), 16 Dec. 1966. Guinea signed the Convention on 28 February 1967, and ratified it on 24 January 1978. See http://treaties.un.org/Pages/ViewDetails.aspx?src=UNTSONLINE&tabid=2&mtdsg_no=IV-4&chapter=4&lang=en#Participants.

64 Alpha-Abdoulaye Diallo, La Vérité du ministre, 114–17.

65 Embassy of FRG (Lewalter) to MFA, Guinea, Note Verbale 247/70, 31 Dec. 1970; Referat IB3, B 34, vol. 812; Eger, Note to File (Aktenvermerk), no. IB3-82.00/90.96, 13 Aug. 1971; Referat IB3, B 34, vol. 811; Aktenvermerk no. St.S 6/71, 3 Jan. 1971; Aktenband B2 (Büro Staatssekretäre, 1968–72), no. 198, AA; USUN (Yost) to State, no. 163, 20 Jan, 1971, POL 29 Guin, SN 1970–1973, RG 59, NACP.

66 NATO (Robert Fred Ellsworth) to State, “Discussion of Situation in Guinea,” no. 18, 5 Jan. 1971; State (Moore) to Conakry, no. 006846, 14 Jan. 1971; POL Guin-Port, SN 1970–1973, RG 59, NACP. Pope Paul VI's message and Touré's response are reprinted in Livre blanc, 563–65.

67 See MacDonald, “Challenge,” 225–59.

68 Jean-François Bayart, “Les études postcoloniales,” 45.

69 “Note d'information: Sékou Touré,” no. 82/BE, MinFOM, Directorate of Political Affairs, 10 Jan. 1958; Fonds Jacques Foccart, Fonds ‘Privé’ 197, Archives Nationales de France (AN/AG5(FPR)197).